Man. He really beat the shit out of Carter.
The other day, in the assignment desk thread, Jason asked:I'd like to see some analysis of these so called Reagan [Democrats]. It seems odd that there has been so much discussion of this demographic group that existed over 20 years ago, with out any one really looking to see if they still exist.Since 1980 the republicans have controlled the White house for 20 of the last 28 years, and the House of Representatives for 12 of the last 14 years. Do the "Reagan Democrats" still identify as democrats, or have most of them long since changed their party identification to Republican?I thought that was an interesting question, but I didn't know the answer. So I sent the query to pollster Ruy Teixeira and asked what he thought happened to the "Reagan Democrats." He replied:
What indeed? And who are they? Do we literally mean folks with a Democratic party ID who voted Reagan? Or people from certain demogrphic groups (e.g., the white working class) who voted for Reagan in which case it's a far larger group. At any rate it would be hard to track the exact voters who identified Dem and voted for Reagan and find out what happened to them as they got older. Certainly it would appear that voters today who look demographically like the voters who voted for Reagan are more likely to have a Rep party ID than they did back in the day....so that presumably means many of them are Rs now.Recent political history often seems startlingly immediate, its effects rippling easily into the present (as evidence, I'm spending the week reading a history of Nixon's election.) But it's worth remembering that Reagan was elected almost three decades ago. He won California, New York, Massachusetts, and even Vermont. Reagan Democrats were hardly the problem. It was Reagan Country. The sort of vote he put together was unique to that moment, that candidate, and those circumstances. The electorate, its composition and universe of possible winning coalitions, is quite different now. Many, many Democratic pundits and strategists connect their party's decline to Reagan's win, so a tremendous amount of mental energy is expended theorizing how they can take back what he wrested from them, and which candidates can win back "the Reagan Democrats." But the battle isn't to reconstruct the coalition that was dominant in the 1980s. It's to envision and form the majority that will endure for the next ten years.
